Rudy's supporters shaky

By Libby

I'd like to think I had something to do with this.

“Yeah, I’m starting to have second thoughts,” said Garry Biniecki, the undersheriff of Sanilac County in Michigan, whom the Giuliani campaign recently rolled out as a “Michigan Leader.”

I'm sure I probably didn't but it is interesting that this comes after I've started hammering Rudy at my Detroit News blog. Maybe I should send this guy a link to it. Just to reinforce his doubts, you know.

In any event, it appears the recent willingness of the legacy media to examine Rudy's lies and obfuscations is having an effect as the article goes on to note other major supporters are second-guessing their position. Only in South Carolina is Mr. 9/11 finding confidence in his campaign. But that's on his alleged 'tough on terror' creds and is in the middle of FoxNews country. Those people are the ones who still believe Saddam has a connection with 9/11 and think we actually found those WMDs.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

By Libby



Laugh out loud funny. [via]

Rudy's Radio Daze

by Capt. Fogg

I saw the movie World Trade Center the other day; the story about the last two NY firefighters to be pulled out of the wreckage alive. The film has them futilely trying to reach anyone on their handheld radios and their inability to do that may help keep Rudy out of the White House. Rudy's sole selling point seems to be the concocted image of him as the Hero of Ground Zero who by magical extension can save us from the nasty men who blow things up.

Mayor Rudy of course didn't buy the more expensive APCO compatible radios but instead gave the no-bid contract (after years of inaction) to supply mobile and handheld radios to police and fire departments to Motorola who had not demonstrated their equipment in field tests and who charged the city $14 million or ten times the proposed price for the system. Is it any surprise that the radios did not work and had to be pulled from the field? As a consequence the fire department had to resort to the decades old radios that had demonstrated their obsolescence after the last WTC attack in 1993.

One of the problems that exists in many areas is the inability of various agencies to communicate directly because some departments have radios that work on different frequencies than others and nearby municipalities may have different systems and channels. This is why radio amateurs are needed to take over when radio towers fall, cell phones go dead and land lines are cut or overloaded. Municipal systems with incompatible frequency assignments and fragile infrastructures are far more vulnerable than people in non-hurricane territory realize.

As happens too often in places like Florida and the gulf coast during hurricanes, NYC became a tower of Babel on 9/11 and it didn't have to happen. Back in the 90's, the Association of Public Safety Officers, or APCO created the Project 25 or P25 standard for radios that are flexible enough to allow them to "talk" with older radios, analog and digital, simplex and duplex with trunked and conventional systems. All the public safety agencies can communicate and police and paramedics can for instance, hear the cries for help from trapped firemen or warn them to get out of a burning building.

Of course the purpose of Republican government is to privatize public funds by distributing them to corporations without competitive bidding or any demonstration of the effectiveness of the product in question. New York seems to have done just that and some people are mad as hell, namely the FDNY who lost so many people because what we had on that day of infamy was a failure to communicate. Firefighters in NYC and across the country along with a New York City Council member are trying to expose Rudy for his incompetence and for having the effrontery to pose as a hero the way he posed for the cameras 6 years ago. Look for the longer story at The REAL Rudy and at today's Huffington Post.

Cross posted from Human Voices

87.0736% extremist

by Capt. Fogg

New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.

85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.

Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.

They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.

They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.

Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.

Cross posted at Human Voices